Determination of the Most Suitable Assessment Methods of River Hydromorphology for Turkey

Abstract

The physical structures and the habitat qualities of any rivers and degradation in rivers have become important elements of hydromorphological assessment because of recognising the influences of these variables in biotic structure that led to the development of more comprehensive assessments of rivers, including river habitat structure within the quality assessment. Accordingly, numerous hydromorphological assessment methods have been developed worldwide including Europe after the Water Framework Directive came into force. Turkey, as a European Union candidate country, has started to implement the Directive and has made some progress. In this context, Turkey needs to develop a national hydromorphological assessment method compliant with the. Two of Multi Criteria Decision Making (methods, which are Analytical Hierarchy Process and Simple Additive Weighting were applied to find the most suitable hydromorphological assessment method for Turkey. For this aim, we reviewed 25 non-European methods and 19 European methods, and determined the Slovenian method and the South African method as the most convenient ones.